With so many comparison shopping search engines, you no longer have an excuse to buy software full price. These simple pointers will show you how to get 10-50% off practically any software or game.

Tip One - compare the price comparison engines.

The top three price comparison engines are Froogle (by Google), Yahoo!Shopping (shopping.yahoo.com) and PriceGrabber. Froogle is the most comprehensive of the three because it does not charge merchants for their listings. The benefit of that is a a very large inventory of listings. However, sometimes this results in obscuring results. For instance, if you enter "Luxor Game" in order to search for a popular casual downloadable game by MumboJumbo, the first six listings will be totally unrelated to the product searched for. On the other hand, Froogle does usually find the best deal for software or games and posts it on the very first page, so all you have to do is to weed out irrelevant results. In this particular case, Froogle was able to find a merchant selling Luxor for $17.99

Yahoo!Shopping, on the other hand, provides more relevant results, with a proper match for "Luxor Game" in the very first position. However, Yahoo!Shopping only list products sold through Yahoo!Shops, therefore the inventory is much smaller, which decreases a chance of finding the lowest price. In this case, the best price for Luxor is $18.88, well above Froogle's.

PriceGrabber works as a paid inclusion service, which means that its inventory of listings is smallest of the three comparison engines. However, because some large software merchants use this service, occasionally, PriceGrabber offers a rare chance fo find a really great deal. In case with "Luxor Game", PriceGrabber matched Yahoo! at $18.88, which is still below Froogle's results.

Tip Two - search only for downloadable versions.

Even though you may find very good prices through Froogle, Yahoo!Shopping or PriceGrabber, a vast majority of the merchants sell boxed versions of software that need to be shipped. These shipping charges often increase the price of software by three to five dollars, which is quite significant for software that may cost only twenty dollars or less. Solution? Buy downloadables version.

The two best places to go for downloadable software are Download.Com (a CNET site) and Deprice.Com. CNET's Download.Com is not a price comparison search engine. However, it lists over 50000 software and game titles that can be downloaded and bought online. The prices are listed right below the date software was added.

Deprice.Com is a specialized website that list only discounted and only downloadable software. It's searchable database contains only 14000 listings, which is not large enough to cover all popular software, but is still worth the search.